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Lana Del Rey’s fixed image.

Lana Del Rey’s music is theatrical, noncommittal, and better on recordings than in person.Credit Photograph by Nicole Nodland

In 2008, Elizabeth Grant, a twenty-two-year-old woman from Lake Placid, recorded an album in Manhattan with the well-known producer David Kahne. It was released digitally in early 2010 as “Lana Del Rey aka Lizzy Grant,” but was pulled offline two months later. This week, Grant, now known professionally as Lana Del Rey, releases “Born to Die,” an album of melodramatic songs that sound something like a film score.

A lot has happened to Grant in four years, most of it on the Internet, which is both her albatross and her instrument. In the last few years, acts like the Weeknd and Salem have benefitted from starting as rumors and remaining cloaked for long enough to drive people to constant speculation—a nervous rhythm suited to blogs and their need for multiple posts per day. Grant has benefitted from a similar dynamic. The allegedly homemade clip for her single “Video Games,” from the new album, has racked up more than twenty-one million views on YouTube since it was posted, last August; the song has gone into the Top Ten in the U.K. and several other countries; and the popular blog Hipster Runoff has rebranded itself the Lana Del Report, with the pseudonymous author Carles writing dozens of obsessive ruminations about her.

Much of the rest of the Internet is equally interested in Del Rey, although few commenters have been as amusing as Carles. Del Rey has managed, like a slow car in the left lane, to make everyone around her angry and over-invested, despite doing relatively little. The Internet, as always, is a double-edged sword. But “Born to Die” is a skillful blend of synthetic nostalgia and teen-age emotions, set pieces constructed for a character she has described as a “gangster Nancy Sinatra” and “Lolita lost in the hood.” Anyone committed to taking Del Rey down now would have to be deaf to the gorgeously odd confections that pop affords. There is little wisdom in “Born to Die,” but more than enough pleasure.

Critics have been especially pointed in attacking Del Rey’s live performances. Several weeks ago, she appeared on “Saturday Night Live” to sing “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans,” another song from the new album. In a tight, cream-colored dress that looked like what Joan Harris might wear if she went back to Roger Sterling, on “Mad Men,” Del Rey wavered in place, looking not entirely comfortable. Though her voice is as deep and as sexy as she seems to think it is, she isn’t entirely sure how to arrange her songs. Her pitch was reliable, but some of the higher notes on her recordings were sung in a throaty manner that made them sound lower, and the event came across as awkward.

On Twitter, the actress Juliette Lewis weighed in negatively; NBC’s Brian Williams wrote a dismissive e-mail to Gawker’s Nick Denton, calling the performance “one of the worst outings in SNL history.” There’s no viable positive stance to take on her live work. Del Rey looked like a nervous dork on national TV; she looked like a bored, arrogant dork with hints of outright disdain for her audience at the Bowery Ballroom, in December. She seems to know where the action is—and it’s not in person. The tour for “Born to Die,” an album that cries out for evening gowns and orchestral accompaniment, will summon a paying audience of teen-age girls and enthusiastic older men. (Not only is there a song called “Lolita,” but “Off to the Races” repeatedly quotes from the novel’s opening sentence: “light of my life, fire of my loins.”) Del Rey is not likely to be good onstage, but this puts her in the company of about fifty per cent of recording artists.

The weirder strain of criticism concerns authenticity. People seem to feel that Del Rey is trying to trick us, though it’s impossible to figure out exactly what that trick would be, as we are dealing with an entertainer and her audience, not a naturally fractious relationship. Detractors cite a variety of presumed conspiracies, some involving the influence of her father, Rob Grant, who is a successful Internet entrepreneur; the rumor of manipulative managers guiding her; the reality of professional songwriters working with her; the question of who paid for the cartoons and the paparazzi footage of the actress Paz de la Huerta that appear in the “Video Games” clip; and how Grant’s top lip got so big so fast. (Grant says she’s undergone no surgical procedures.) Surely no equivalent male star would be subject to the same level of examination.

Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, “Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in ‘The Iron Lady.’ ”

In the fifteen songs on “Born to Die,” Del Rey is both theatrical and noncommittal. But the new album does not make “Lana Del Rey aka Lizzy Grant” seem like an error that needed redacting. The earlier work had a variety of tempos, styles, and moods, which may be exactly why Del Rey ditched it; its song titles hinted at a notion of going retro (“Put Me in a Movie,” “Mermaid Motel”), but the ungainly album title revealed ambivalence about Grant’s identity. “Born to Die,” by contrast, is a model of consistent branding. The string section thrums in permanent lassitude, the number of beats per minute hovers in the eighties, and Del Rey’s pliable, smoky voice suggests that nothing is a problem, including the narrative contradictions that she plants throughout the album.

Several demos were leaked before the album’s release, and they played with faster tempos and guitars and more aggressive sounds. All of that is gone. The lack of active rhythms was a wise correction by somebody: Del Rey is often at a loss when mobile—she won’t be challenging Beyoncé to a dance-off anytime soon—but she’s fairly compelling when simply looking into a camera and declaiming. Anyone crouching on the Internet, ready to tag Del Rey’s mistakes, will be frustrated by “Born to Die,” which is too expert to register as a failure.

Most of the tracks were produced by Emile Haynie, who has mostly recorded hip-hop until now—a slightly misleading credential, since “Born to Die” sounds only intermittently like hip-hop, and there is nothing like rapping (except for a few Dad-like eruptions of vernacular in the midst of all the beehive boilerplate lyrics, like “fresh to death,” in “Blue Jeans”). Some beats poke their heads up, but the template is very strict: strings dominate every song. The production is almost distractingly even, as if everyone involved had been locked in a room for a month with the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” which has itself been accused of being derivative. In fact, “National Anthem” sounds more than a little as if it were based on that song’s famous string part, though the only relevant piece of music Del Rey has mentioned is Thomas Newman’s score for “American Beauty.”

The album that lurks behind “Born to Die” is Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” which is one of the most visible and successful marriages of sharp hip-hop edges and the luxurious drape of a string section. That album finally equalled the conspicuous consumption he loves to talk about, sounding like what would be playing in a house filled with gilded bathtubs and expensive art. But, unlike West, whose lyrics convey real complexity, Del Rey doesn’t have the emotional and psychological depth to support all the satin and spotlights. Her invocations of Sinatra and Lolita are entirely appropriate to the sumptuous backing tracks, but, when it comes to lyrics, she and her collaborators get lost in a tangle of keywords.

The Del Rey character is a combination of disaffected and cynical and romantic and brutal and naïve, which makes her sound more forgetful than profound. “Diet Mountain Dew” mentions eternal love, yet on the next track, “National Anthem,” Del Rey tries to mimic the knowing Madonna of the nineties, half-whispering, “Money is the reason we exist, everybody knows it—it’s a fact.” “Dark Paradise” is perhaps about a lover who has died and appears only in her dreams, although her vocals never reach beyond a sort of pleasant, blasé texture. It’s hard to imagine anything actually bothering Del Rey, especially love.

As she moves between guises, her lyrics begin to read like Post-its from a marketing meeting. “Tying cherry knots” is a reference to a fairly difficult party trick that suggests an erotically advanced tongue, and “I even think I found God in the flashbulbs of the pretty cameras” suggests a jaded persona that matches all that flopping about and taking it glamorously easy. And this is where Del Rey stumbles slightly. “Born to Die” is full of rubbery, well-formed melodies and harmonic richness—who cares who wrote much of it—but the character of Del Rey, authentic or not, is so inconsistent that she fades from view, into her own photo spread. ♦

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.